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Stuck On Stupid, Ineffective, Trivial

To: The Saint Paul City Council
From: Mitch Berg, one of your few remaining ATMs
Re: Your work ethic

The Saint Paul City Council, having saved the downtown economic scene, balanced the city’s budget without gang-raping the city’s few remaining productive taxpayers, preventing a free-fall in property values…

…sheesh, I’m sorry. I was laughing. But it wasn’t the mirthful laugh of the happy and carefree. It was more the resigned hacking cough of the guy in the engine room of a ship whose captain just keeps on ramming icebergs, since he’s still technically “afloat”, just to see what’ll happen.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah. The City Council wants to ban scary guns, provided that they’re just the ones in the hands of the law-abiding Minnesotan:

At the Wednesday, Jan. 2 council meeting, they amended their annual request to lawmakers to include a crackdown on semi-automatic weapons and high capacity magazines.

They join a chorus of municipal bodies, politicians and Hollywood celebrities clamoring for tighter gun laws in the wake of the horrific school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut.

Let’s summarize here:

The council of a stagnant city with a shriveling business base and whose only real resource anymore is “cheap-ish housing in a crap market” has…

…wasted city time to pass a meaningless resolution to…

…punish the vast majority of gun owners, the scrupulously law-abiding ones, because of…

…something they didn’t do, urging an action that…

…has never, ever, not even once, had a positive effect on violent crime, but indeed is positively linked to higher violent crime rates.

By the way, I’d like a word with the authors of the City Hall Scoop blog post:

Some gun enthusiasts are dubious that a ban on semi-automatics would have prevented the Newtown tragedy and other tragic gun deaths.

Well, no – not just “gun enthusiasts”, but “people who actually study the issue empirically, rather than filtering it through partisan politics”.

Let’s try to get that straight.

Here’s the release from Council Member Chris Tolbert’s office:

Councilmember Tolbert amends City’s 2013 Legislative Agenda to support changes to State and Federal gun regulation

St. Paul – In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy and gun violence around the country, Councilmember Chris Tolbert (Ward 3) and the Saint Paul City Council unanimously amended the City’s Legislative Agenda to include provisions related to gun regulation. Resolution 13-23 encourages the backing of amendments to State laws that could ban semi-automatic weapons and high capacity magazines.

Mr. Tolbert: I may or may not own several semi-automatic weapons, of a type not dissimilar to the kind that the police and deputies who protect you at your City Hall office carry. And like the majority of hunting weapons found throughout Minnesota.

Being a cake-eating Highland-Park DFL lotus-eater, you may not know any of this.

And apparently you don’t know what happened the last time a bunch of metro DFLers started on a tear against the law-abiding, gun-owning citizen.

Check out the 2002 Minnesota legislative elections. Or, for that matter, the 1994 Congressional elections.

Keep up the great work, Mr. Tolbert and all of your colleagues. The GOP overrreached on gay marriage – an issue that affects a tiny minority of Minnesotans – and you see what it cost ’em.

Over half of Minnesotans own guns. Many of them vote DFL. Many of them live outside the smothering domain of the urban DFL, and take the Second Amendment seriously.

Considering the rise in gun permit requests, paired with the jump in sales of guns and ammo, you’d think cities would be bidding against each other to bring in firearms dealers for the tax revenue they represent.

TBS, that would be an awesome sign to covertly slap up next to the “Guns are banned on these premises” signs you see around town. It might wake up some of the less astute among us.

Dave, one thing I’ve learned about leftists, is that they’d rather stand on misguided principle than bring in honest money. It’s why so many of them are willing to leech off society and become professional protesters (and/or politicians). Most hard left city council types would rather go without that revenue (and cut important civil services like police and fire) than to have their treasuries sullied by bloody gun money.

You need look no further than Mark Kocielski’s more-than-a-decade long losing battle with Mpls.

One would think that Minnesota’s preemption law (State Preemption of Local Law, MSS 471.633 Firearms) would prevent the GOP National Convention Protester Welcoming Committee from getting carried away with this foolishness.

The law is intended to keep these fiefdoms from enacting all types of restrictive and potentially dangerous laws that only serve to ensnare law abiding citizens of other fiefdoms whose laws may be entirely different.

At least you’d think so. However, since dear leader President Obama is not constrained by such things, maybe his minions hope to enjoy the same privilege.

Perhaps any illegal state-wide gun bills could also include the language that would legalize homosexual marriage in MN. Kind of a progressive two-for-one. That would be fun to watch if it’s even legal. However, my last prediction regarding the marriage amendment didn’t seem work out so well, so maybe not …

Do feinstein andObama own stock in an assault rifle manufacturing company? Look at the prices on gun broker and guns America for .223 rifles. A rifle I could havebought for 599 in October is 2000. I don’t envy the copper assigned to go door to door collecting all of them when the ban takes effect.